ADA website lawsuits against Shopify stores: what federal court records show

Where were they filed?

In our count, most suits were filed in New York. New York’s four federal districts had about two in three of all the suits we found. They had about three in four of the suits that named a US Shopify store. Here’s each court, with the suits naming a US Shopify store first, then all the suits we found there:

• Southern District of New York: 702 of 1,761
• Eastern District of New York: 131 of 490
• Southern District of Florida: 59 of 425
• Northern District of Illinois: 93 of 202
• The other 34 courts together: 101 of 604

This year looks a little different. The Northern District of Illinois is close behind the Southern District of New York. So far in 2026, the Southern District of New York had 132 of the 364 suits we found. The Northern District of Illinois had 123. Among this year’s 179 that named a US Shopify store, it’s 76 to 64.

How we counted

CourtListener is an open archive of federal court records, run by Free Law Project, a non-profit. We searched it for the complaint, the document that starts a suit.

We looked only at suits the courts list as ADA cases. In those, we looked for the word “website” with a “www” address right after it. Our search covered suits filed from January 3, 2022 to September 29, 2026.

A suit counted for a website only when the complaint’s own words tied that website to the business sued. We never guessed a website from a company’s name.

Then we checked each website once, with one visit to its homepage, on September 30 or October 5, 2026. Was it a store on Shopify? Was it a US store? We went by the country and main currency in the store’s own Shopify data.

Here’s how the numbers narrowed:

• 3,482 suits our search found, in 38 federal district courts
• 3,185 whose complaint tied a website to the business sued
• 2,994 different websites in those suits
• 2,468 websites we could check
• 1,046 US stores on Shopify among them

The 2,468 websites we could check were named in 2,614 suits. That’s where the four in ten earlier in the post comes from.

The count is ours, not CourtListener’s. Free Law Project didn’t make it or check it.

What our count leaves out

CourtListener’s help page says the archive holds “millions of documents”. It also says “There is no easy answer to” the question of what’s in it. So we take it that some complaints just aren’t there.

What the archive and our search miss

• Suits in state courts. We searched federal records only.
• Demand letters. A letter isn’t a suit, so it isn’t in the court records we searched.
• Federal suits whose complaint the archive doesn’t hold.
• Complaints that name the website some other way, like leaving out the “www” our search looked for.
• Suits the courts filed under another category.

What we set aside or couldn’t check

• 141 suits against colleges, 11 employment suits, and 145 where we found no website tied to the business.
• 526 websites we couldn’t check. Bot protection blocked most of them.

What we didn’t look at

• What each store looked like when it was sued. We saw it only on the day we checked. A store sued in 2022 may have moved to Shopify since, or left it.
• Whether each suit was won, settled or dropped.
• What each complaint says in full. We didn’t read every one.

So take our numbers as a floor, not a total.

What does the Justice Department say?

In March 2022, the US Department of Justice published “Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA”. It speaks of “businesses open to the public”, and its examples begin with retail stores. The department says it has “consistently taken the position” that the ADA’s requirements apply to what these businesses offer, including on the web.

If a letter or a suit arrives

A suit in our count is a complaint filed in court. A demand letter isn’t in it. It’s natural to want to answer quickly. Don’t reply on your own. Take it to a lawyer first. Our guide to demand letters walks you through the first steps.